


Ultimate Thief

by jalendavi_lady



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon - First Anime, Community: fma_fic_contest, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-10
Updated: 2010-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jalendavi_lady/pseuds/jalendavi_lady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Greed has had a long time to think. And to remember. Set during the first anime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ultimate Thief

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Homunculus POV (500-1000 words) prompt at [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/fma_fic_contest/profile)[**fma_fic_contest**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/fma_fic_contest/) .

He struggles against his bonds in the dark.

 _That **BITCH**!_

He wishes he could shout it out loud.

Hell, whispering would be an improvement on this!

He vaguely remembers it then, so faint it can barely be trusted. Someone, his mother, perhaps, or the aunt he's not even sure he had, washing his mouth out with soap for calling some little girl in the neighborhood that when he was growing up.

If he ever grew up in the first place. He's unsure of that.

They all are, of course.

 _She_ said that it was all just trying to imagine what wasn't.

He doubts that.

He's wanted to possess many things in his long years, but never something that was not real.

 _That's a human flaw,_ he thinks, managing to fight the alchemical binding enough to sneer.

And he _wants_ these memories.

They are, if real, the oldest things he has. The germ around which everything else grew.

The only things she left him with when she bound him here. Them and the lives he's accumulated over his long existence.

He can remember clearly the first moments, back when she was wearing a different body (he somehow knows it was not her first, now--he's more than aware of the sheer _waste_ she's willing to accept in her love of new skin), when she introduced him to the red stones.

 _I hadn't even figured out my shield then,_ he thinks with a kind of wonder.

He'd needed those lives back then, for survival.

Now, he merely wants them.

 _As if there's any such thing as 'mere' wanting._ He manages to sneer again.

He counts them, one by one, not missing a one of his thousands of lives.

Nothing changes in the world around him. The binds do not so much as loosen. It never does. They never do.

He can barely, barely, barely remember that first clear moment, waking up barely able to move on the floor, the smell of blood and chalk in the air.

There's a body in the room, a woman only slightly past her prime whose appearance sticks in his mind, as if she _matters_ somehow. Her chest is dark with dried blood, and even in his uninformed new eyes back then there was something horrifically _wrong_ about that, about the way the curves of her body simply weren't there in places.

There's another woman in the room, blood on her dress. She's younger. Much younger.

"Do you remember anything?"

His eyes widen in the dark. He hasn't remembered that part before, hasn't remembered that even _she_ had thought he might remember something before.

 _That **bitch**!_ he thinks again.

Which means that woman on the floor might have meant something to him before, might have been someone dear bloodstained Dante took away from him, like she was always taking things away! Like she was always claiming giving him existence was enough to justify the thefts!

But no, he realizes with a chill. This was from... from _before_.

She stole from him _before_.

He tries the hardest he ever has to remember. He wants the memory. He knows it's real. And it's the only possible thing he can add to his possessions now so he MUST have it, the same way the weak truly mortal humans need air.

And then he remembers.

He'd come back on the fourth day after she broke the relationship, come to beg her to take him back despite something she'd taken offense at.

He'd even brought flowers, much as he'd hated the prices.

She'd been there, with her apprentice elsewhere in the apartment.

"You shouldn't be here. Get out," she demanded.

And somehow, something had happened, her voice said "I always knew greed would be your undoing, remember?" and everything went dark and there was nothing to remember until...

The ground moves. The bonds loosen. He barely notices.

 _That **bitch**!_

His anger runs cold.

 _She took **everything** from me!_ he rages. _Even my **self**!_

The things homunculi don't get, no matter how long they grasp for them.

To age. To grow old, be respected for a life well lived. To even have a family.

To go through the pain of death once, and not come back, and have things be over.

The world moves again.

To die and have someone there who cares that it's happening at all. To be mourned, and buried, and given a name on a gravestone.

Even if he gathers everything to him, even the planet itself, he can never get that. Never.

The bonds loosen entirely, and he laughs from the freedom despite the cold anger at the theft.

He has his lives, the lives _she_ fed him, and the years and years a homunculi can live.

After all, she bound him for over a century and he's still just as fit as her was.

 _She's probably acquired and discarded five more bodies by now,_ he thinks with disgust.

There's movement around him.

Tails, claws, manes... _human-based chimera?!_

He grins. _Time to acquire an army. And then, then Dante, I'll give you what you stole from me. I'll give you what you've been running from for so long as a special gift from me to you. For old times' sake, shall we say?_

He laughs again.

Revenge is, after all, a possession that goes well on any shelf and cannot ever be taken away.

Greed likes things that can never be taken away.

**Author's Note:**

> I read a while back that supposedly there was a piece of anime-related media that hinted Greed had been formed from one of Dante's old boyfriends. The plot bunny bit. Hard.


End file.
